973.7L63   Bradley,  Preston. 

B3B72a 

Abraham  Lincoln,  a  study 

in  genius. 


LINCOLN  ROOM 


.UNIVERSITY  OF  ILLINOIS 
'  LIBRARY 


J> 


A 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 
A  Study  in  Genius 

By 
DR.  PRESTON  BRADLEY 

We 

The 
Peoples  Church  of  Chicago 

NEW  PANTHEON  THEATRE 

4650  SHERIDAN  ROAD 

February  Eleventh,  Nineteen  twenty-three 


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919  Sheridan  Road,  Chicago 


Dr.    Bradley    speaks    extemporaneously.      The    addresses 
stenographically   reported  by  Mr.  Edwin  L.  Cobb 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN— A  STUDY  IN  GENIUS 


I  am  afraid  my  address  this  morning  will  be  interpreted 
by  many  of  you  very  much  as  two  Irishmen  interpreted  a 
speech  which  Mr.  Bryan  made  shortly  after  his  return  from 
Europe.  Two  Irishmen  went  to  hear  Mr.  Bryan  speak.  After 
the  address  one  turned  to  the  other  and  said:  "Well,  how 
did  you  like  it?"  He  said,  "It  struck  me  that  Mr.  Bryan 
aint  as  good  as  he  used  to  be."  The  other  said,  "No,  and 
he  never  was,  either!" 

I  found  this  week  somewhere  between  sixteen  miles  from 
Alberta  in  northern  Minnesota,  22°  below  zero,  and  the 
lecture  room  in  Lansing,  Michigan,  Friday  evening  with 
over  six  hundred  men,  packed  so  tight  you  could  not  breathe 
— I  mean  the  air — somewhere  between  Alberta  and  Lansing 
I  found  this  hard  cold  which  is  the  matter  with  me  this 
morning.  And  it  is  not  a  bit  of  fun.  Last  night  was  the 
second  night  since  Sunday  that  I  have  been  in  a  bed,  that  is, 
in  a  real  bed.  No  one  ever  called  a  Pullman  berth  a  bed. 
I  was  told  to  go  to  bed  when  I  arrived  in  Chicago  yesterday 
and  stay  there  until  I  was  all  right.  And  if  I  had  to  do  that 
I  would  be  there  the  rest  of  my  life.  Folks  that  have  to  go 
to  bed  until  they  are  all  right  have  to  stay  there  the  rest  of 
their  lives.  At  least,  I  would.  So  I  said,  No,  I  am  going  to 
Church  this  morning;  I  am  going  to  talk  a  little  while  on 
Abraham  Lincoln.  I  don 't  suppose  I  can  talk  very  long, 
because  I  really  am  suffering.  But  I  believe  in  the  Law  of 
Compensation  in  this  world,  that  no  one  ought  to  suffer  for 
doing  good  and  I  don't  believe  any  one  suffers  from  doing 
good,  and  perhaps  a  good  way  for  me  to  get  well  is  for  me 
to  go  over  to  the  Church  and  preach.  And  against  the  reason 
of  most  folks  that  knew  the  situation,  I  said,  "I  am  going," 
and  here  I  am,  and  the  longer  I  am  here  the  better  I  feel. 
I  am  not  half  as  much  worried  as  a  lot  of  folks  I  know. 
I  sort  of  feel  that  the  things  that  are  not  good  God  doesn't 
send,  and  if  God  doesn't  send  them  they  are  not  vital  to  us. 
So  get  rid  of  them.  And  if  you  have  to  listen  to  a  sermon 
to  get  rid  of  them,  all  right;  and  if  you  have  to  preach  one, 
all  right;  but,  whatever  you  do,  get  rid  of  them.  I  don't 
know  what  there  is  about  colds  and  aches  and  fevers  and 

sore  throats  that  is  causing  so  much  trouble  in  America  just 

s 


now.  I  don 't  know  what  it  is,  probably  because  it  is  popular, 
and  anybody  that  has  not  a  cold  now  isn  't  in  it,  and  I  suppose 
the  most  of  us  want  to  be  popular  about  some  things,  even  that. 

There  isn't  any  theme  in  the  world  that  I  know  of  that 
is  so  inspiring  to  submerge  self  and  all  its  laws  and  all  its 
attachments  to  earth  and  soar  into  the  heights  which  are 
touched  by  the  spirit  of  God  and  of  Truth  like  the  theme  of 
Abraham  Lincoln,  because  Abraham  Lincoln  was  so  tall  in  the 
really  worth-while  things  of  life  that  he  himself  parted  the 
stars,  and  his  outstanding  genius  was  so  lofty  that  one  cannot 
help  when  they  stand  upon  this  plane  of  earth  and  cast  their 
eyes  star-ward  and  skyward  to  see  the  outstanding  beauty 
and  power  of  his  life,  and  if  there  ever  was  a  problem  which 
the  speaker  or  the  historian  or  biographer  had  to  overcome, 
it  is  the  problem  of  so  vitalizing  the  personality  that  they  are 
discussing  that  they  shall  lose  much  of  that  which  they  have, 
which  the  world  has  brought  to  them  by  the  theory  or  by  the 
system  of  speculation,  and  they  shall  become  outstanding 
in  their  realism  and  in  their  sense  of  humanity. 

We  have  heard  so  much  about  the  almost  spectacular 
Lincoln;  the  Lincoln  who  was  almost  a  great  dramatist;  the 
Lincoln  who  had  surrounded  himself  with  so  much  that  was 
purely  the  dramaturgic  in  life ;  we  have  heard  so  much  of  the 
Lincoln  of  Gettysburg ;  we  have  heard  so  much  of  the  Lincoln 
of  the  White  House;  we  have  heard  so  much  of  the  Lincoln 
in  Ford's  Theater  on  the  tragic  night  in  April,  1865.  We 
have  associated  with  the  character  and  personality  of  Lincoln 
something  which  takes  him  away  from  the  great  humanity  in 
which  most  of  us  move  and  live.  We  almost  forget  the  human 
Lincoln,  the  Lincoln  of  flesh  and  blood,  the  Lincoln  who  had 
his  problems  and  heart-aches,  the  Lincoln  who  had  his  tears 
and  his  sorrows,  the  Lincoln  who  was  intensely  human  and 
through  a  rarefication  of  the  impulses  of  that  humanity  was 
able  to  achieve  in  the  estimation  of  the  world  of  genius  that 
is  rarely  achieved  since  the  foundation  of  time.  For  I  main- 
tain that  there  is  nothing  supernatural  about  the  life  and 
personality  of  Abraham  Lincoln  in  the  sense  of  his  genius 
being  of  an  extraneous  origin.  I  think  on  the  part  of  the 
world  there  is  altogether  too  much  stress  and  too  much  shal- 
lowness in  the  thought  that  great  men  are  born;  that  the 
genius  is  born;  the  great  outstanding  genius  is  the  product 
of  some  great  background  of  evolution.  Obviously,  there  is 
a  certain  element  of  truth  in  this  philosophy,  for  we  are 
utterly  unable  to  account  for  some  of  the  great  personalities 
of  human  history  through  any  law  of  heredity  or  environment. 


It  is  quite  true  that  there  is  some  great  development  in 
life  that  attaches  itself  to  some  personalities  that  defies  all 
the  laws  upon  which  men  usually  build  the  thing  that  we  call 
genius.  But  if  I  have  correctly  studied  the  life  and  times 
of  Abraham  Lincoln,  as  I  have  tried  to  do  since  early  youth, 
I  cannot  detect  that  there  is  about  Abraham  Lincoln  anything 
that  will  add  to  the  theory  of  the  biologist  or  anthropologist 
or  psychologist  or  psychoanalyst  or  Freudianist,  in  their 
philosophy  of  what  constitutes  genius. 

There  are  so  many  of  us  who  think  that  genius  just 
happens,  and  then  with  the  happening  of  that  genius  we  run 
into  all  sorts  of  excursions,  into  the  realm  of  insanity  and 
into  the  realm  of  various  influences  of  the  emotional  life,  into 
its  reactions  upon  the  man  of  genius.  And  immediately  we 
have  a  school  that  says  no  man  can  be  a  genius  without  an 
element  of  insanity  involved  in  it,  and  there  is  always  the 
serious  element  to  associate  with  genius  something  of  an  ab- 
normal development,  where  you  have  extensive  development 
on  one  plane  there  is  something  exceedingly  defective  some- 
where else.  And  it  is  true,  if  we  analyze  the  capacity  of  the 
great  and  outstanding  men  of  genius,  due  to  the  fact  that 
he  does  possess  in  some  particular  emphasis  some  great  out- 
standing power  or  creativeness  there  may  be  in  the  symmetry 
of  his  life  a  slight  disturbance  so  there  is  not  an  exactly 
normal  relationship  existing  throughout  his  entire  life.  But 
to  the  extent  to  which  some  of  our  Freudians  and  psycholo- 
gists go,  it  seems  to  me,  is  utterly  ridiculous.  For  when  we 
come  to  the  character  of  Abraham  Lincoln  no  man  can  deny 
his  genius.  You  can  go  over  his  life  with  the  finest  of  analyti- 
cal power,  and  when  you  are  all  through,  carefully  investigat- 
ing and  carefully  building  your  deductions  from  your  in- 
vestigations of  his  career  and  his  life — there  he  stands,  that 
unimpeachable  outstanding  genius;  although  be  it  a  human 
being,  a  man  who  could  tell  stories  that  had  more  latitude 
than  longitude,  a  man  that  gave  every  evidence  of  under- 
standing the  heart-throb  of  the  world,  and,  yet,  a  man  that 
had  achieved  and  developed  to  the  rank  of  genius  of  the  first- 
water  type;  not  a  genius  whose  personal  life  was  seared  by 
immoralities,  such  as  some  of  the  genius  of  literature  and  art ; 
not  a  genius  who  rose  over  the  crushed  and  broken  bodies  of 
bleeding  men  and  women  and  little  children,  like  Napoleon  of 
France ;  not  a  genius  who  could  stand  upon  the  borderland  of 
the  Unknowable  in  the  world  of  theological  and  psychological 
interpretations  and  become  the  medium  through  which  some 
great  fundamental  principle  of  philosophy  or  of  immortality 


should  be  born,  for  Lincoln  had  very  little  to  say  about  either ; 
but,  a  genius  who  possessed  the  fine  symmetry  of  normality. 
For  it  is  not  necessary  for  genius  to  be  insane,  nor  is  it 
necessa^  for  genius  to  give  evidence  of  the  immoralities  of 
the  human  plane. 

And  so  when  we  come  to  this  character  of  Abraham 
Lincoln  we  are  face  to  face  with  an  entirely  new  conception 
and  interpretation  of  the  law  of  genius.  It  is  quite  true  that 
we  cannot  explain  Lincoln  by  his  nativity,  and  yet  those  who 
intimate  that  Lincoln's  blood  was  not  pure  blood  are  those 
who  are  not  informed  with  the  life  of  Lincoln.  Abraham 
Lincoln 's  father  was  of  a  very  fine  family  of  very  high  order. 
The  Lincolns  that  came  out  of  the  East  into  Kentucky  were 
poor,  but  there  were  branches  of  their  family  in  the  East 
that  were  people  of  superior  quality.  The  father  of  Abraham 
Lincoln  was  a  poor  man,  with  all  the  poverty  of  those  years ; 
and  to  be  poor  those  years  meant  a  great  deal  more  than  to 
be  poor  at  this  time.  But  Abraham  Lincoln's  blood  was  good 
blood  and  it  was  pure  blood.  And  that  genius  of  motherhood 
which  his  mother  possessed,  his  own  mother  who  left  him  so 
early  in  life,  and  then  the  fortunate  circumstance  of  being- 
blessed  with  a  foster-mother  who  loved  him  like  his  own 
mother,  Nancy  Hanks,  who  carried  the  father  of  Abraham 
Lincoln  when  Lincoln  was  still  a  boy.  But  don't  under- 
estimate and  don't  fall  heir  to  that  error  or  that  untruth 
which  permeates  so  much  of  the  more  or  less  hazy  atmosphere 
about  Lincoln  that  his  birth  is  shrouded  in  mystery.  The 
parenthood  of  Abraham  Lincoln  is  not  in  doubt.  I  hear  many 
people  who  cast  almost  an  intimate  slur  upon  the  fact  that 
Abraham  Lincoln  was  a  nameless  baby.  The  parenthood  of 
Lincoln  is  established  beyond  all  question  of  doubt. 

We  have  in  the  People's  Church  a  woman  who  is  very 
closely  related  to  the  Reverend  Thomas  Head,  who  was  the 
clergyman  that  officiated  at  the  wedding  of  Lincoln's  father 
and  mother,  and  the  Reverend  William  E.  Barton,  who  is  an 
authority  on  Lincoln  in  America,  has  recently  given  new  light 
to  the  world  on  these  early  and  obscure  years  of  Lincoln. 

Now,  my  Freudian  friend  and  my  psychoanalyst,  and  you 
who  are  always  trying  to  link  up  something  of  a  physical  or 
animal  nature  with  the  transcendental  beauty  of  immortal 
genius,  let  me  call  your  attention  to  the  fact  that  you  cannot 
explain  Lincoln  by  any  of  your  theories  of  insanity  or  of 
sexuality.  Abraham  Lincoln  was  the  son  of  a  man  and  a 
woman  who  were  married  and  who  loved,  and  Abraham 
Lincoln's  name  is  a  name  that  is  unsullied  by  any  of  that 


sort  of  thing.  You  cannot  explain  the  genius  of  Lincoln 
through  his  nativity.  His  family  did  not  distinguish  itself 
in  the  way  that  we  expect  or  might  expect  families  would 
distinguish  themselves,  but  neither  has  the  son  of  Abraham 
Lincoln.  He  has  a  son  living  today  in  the  United  States,  who 
was  a  resident  of  the  city  of  Chicago  for  a  great  many  years. 
Abraham  Lincoln's  son,  Robert  T.  Lincoln,  was  a  man  who 
developed  great  business  ability  and  was  somewhat  of  a 
financial  wizard,  associated  for  many  years  with  the  Pullman 
Company  of  merica.  But  Robert  T.  Lincoln  has  never  given 
one  scintilla  of  evidence  in  his  entire  life  that  he  partakes  of 
one  single  quality  of  the  genius  of  his  father. 

Don't  explain  or  attempt  to  explain  everything  by  this 
law  of  heredity. 

Ralph  Wado  Emerson,  the  most  gigantic  intellect  that  the 
transcendental  school  of  the  East  ever  had,  had  a  son  who  was 
an  idiot.  I  could  go  on  and  name  you  hundreds  and  hundreds 
and  hundreds  of  men  who  have  distinguished  themselves — 
not  to  the  rank  of  genius,  I  will  admit,  but  who  have  dis- 
tinguished themselves,  that  you  cannot  account  for  through 
the  mere  law  of  heredity.  Of  course,  it  is  a  sensible  child  that 
picks  out  a  great  grand-father.  We  must  all  admit  that.  But, 
nevertheless,  we  cannot  explain  genius  by  the  mere  law  of 
heredity. 

Now  let  us  look  at  Abraham  Lincoln  just  a  moment  and  see 
if  we  cannot  discover  in  his  own  persistency  and  in  his  own 
ambition  something  of  the  key  that  will  open  up  to  us  an 
understanding  of  Lincoln.  Altogether  Abraham  Lincoln  went 
to  school  less  than  twelve  months.  Now,  think  of  that!  The 
first  four  or  five  of  those  months  were  spent  in  a  "blab" 
school. 

Now  I  know  by  the  way  you  receive  that  that  very  few 
of  you  know  what  a  "blab"  school  is.  If  there  is  anyone 
here  from  southern  Indiana  or  some  parts  of  Kentucky  they 
will  know  what  a  "blab"  school  is.  It  is  a  school  where  the 
students  all  study  out  loud  in  order  to  convince  the  teacher 
that  they  are  studying.  And  Abraham  Lincoln's  early 
schooling  was  spent  in  a  "blab"  school.  There  these  pupils 
sat  and  studied  out  loud.  How  far  we  have  gone  in  education 
in  the  lifetime  of  one  man! 

Well,  altogether,  Abraham  Lincoln  had  only  twelve  months 
of  schooling,  as  we  speak  of  going  to  school. 

The  first  evidence  of  the  latent  genius  of  Abraham  Lincoln 
in  the  world  of  the  intellectual  in  which  he  later  expressed 
his  superiority  was  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  Abraham 


Lincoln  had  such  a  tendency  toward  a  complete  understanding 
that  he  permitted  no  obscurity  to  take  precedence.  Lincoln 
tells  us  that  the  only  thing  in  his  life  that  really  made  him 
mad  was  to  have  people  talk  about  things  in  his  presence  as 
a  boy  and  young  man  that  he  did  not  understand,  and  he 
tells  us  that  when  his  father  would  have  some  of  the  neighbors 
in  and  they  would  sit  around  the  fireside  in  the  evening  and 
discuss  some  of  the  growing  questions  of  politics  in  connection 
with  the  frontier  and  they  used  words  that  Abraham  Lincoln 
did  not  know,  that  he  would  stay  up  after  they  had  gone  and 
would  not  retire  or  close  his  eyes  until  he  had  mastered  those 
words  and  those  ideas.  It  was  the  predisposition  in  the  mind 
of  Lincoln  to  master  that  which  he  did  not  understand  with 
a  clarity  that  needed  no  explanation  that  was  the  foundation 
of  Abraham  Lincoln's  intellectual  superiority.  It  was  not 
that  his  brain  was  any  different  than  anybody  else's  in  its 
physical  make-up  or  its  physical  inheritance,  but  he  had  an 
inherent  predisposition  and  tendency  to  master  that  which 
was  presented  to  him  before  he  gave  up  the  idea.  He  would 
turn  ideas  over  in  his  mind,  and  as  he  once  said,  he  would 
keep  an  idea  in  his  mind  until  he  had  bounded  it  on  the  east 
and  bounded  it  on  the  west  and  bounded  it  on  the  north  and 
south. 

Now  that  was  the  latent  thing  in  the  intellectual  life  of 
Abraham  Lincoln  that  is  so  outstanding  in  its  truthfulness 
to  the  one  that  is  trying  to  analyze  the  genius  of  Lincoln. 

Now  we  are  often  told  that  Lincoln  was  a  great  reader. 
There  are  those  who  knew  him  late  in  his  lifetime  who  said 
that  that  might  have  been  true  in  early  years,  but  it  was  not 
true  in  his  later  years.  Lincoln's  library  consisted  of  "Pil- 
grim's Progress" — I  am  speaking  of  him  as  a  young  man — 
"Life  of  Washington,"  "Constitutional  History  of  Indiana," 
a  copy  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  the  i '  Declara- 
tion of  Independence,"  and  the  Bible.  Shakespeare  was 
lacking,  and  due  to  the  fact  that  Lincoln  quoted  very  little 
in  any  of  his  speeches  of  any  literature  (Lincoln  quoted  prob- 
ably at  little  as  any  one  that  has  ever  been  in  American  public 
life),  we  are  led  to  believe  that  he  did  not  have  a  working 
familiarity  with  the  great  classics  of  literature.  He  knew 
little  of  Shakespeare;  he  knew  nothing  of  Greek;  he  knew 
nothing  of  Latin.  He  knew  nothing  of  any  tongue  other  than 
the  tongue  of  his  nativity.  But  his  quality  of  mind  due  to  a 
moral  rectitude — there  is  no  character  in  the  history  of  the 
world  that  gives  as  plainly  as  Abraham  Lincoln  does  the 
power  for  illustration,  of  the  effect  of  the  mind  over  the  body 


and  the  career  of  a  man.  Abraham  Lincoln 's  background  was 
his  unimpeachable  integrity  of  mind,  a  mind  that  he  had 
made  so  exact  and  so  analytical  and  yet  had  retained  all  of 
the  finer  qualities  of  a  beautiful  human  touch;  a  mind  that 
controlled  his  destiny  and  outlined  his  life  and  gave  him  in 
his  darkest  and  deepest  hours  a  fortification  such  as  few  men 
in  this  world  have  ever  achieved. 

Now  to  the  character  of  Lincoln.  To  the  youth,  which  is 
my  primary  concern  this  morning.  In  some  of  these  side- 
lights of  the  genius  of  Lincoln  there  is  everything  to  make 
one  feel  that  if  any  one  in  the  world  ought  to  have  given  up  it 
was  Abraham  Lincoln.  Abraham  Lincoln's  whole  life,  from 
the  time  he  was  born  until  1860,  was  largely  a  life  of  repeated 
disappointments  and  failures.  The  first  thing  that  happened 
was  a  business  failure.  Most  men  never  recover  from  that. 
But  Abraham  Lincoln  was  in  business  and  the  firm  of  Lincoln 
and  his  business  associates  simply  went  into  bankruptcy  and 
Lincoln  took  over  the  debts  of  that  firm,  and  for  the  first 
early  years  of  his  young  manhood,  for  he  moved  to  Spring- 
field to  practice  law,  Abraham  Lincoln  was  paying  the  debts 
of  the  bankrupt  firm.  That  was  the  first  experience  that  he 
had  in  his  life — failure. 

The  sweetheart  of  his  youth;  the  only  woman  that 
Abraham  Lincoln  ever  loved,  was  taken  away  from  him  in 
that  tragic  death  of  his  sweetheart.  And  where  you  find  a 
rugged  virile  heart,  touched  by  the  dew  of  the  out-of-door, 
with  muscles  trained  by  the  splintering  of  oak  rails,  when  a 
heart  like  that  loves,  it  loves  deeply.  Those  pioneers  in  their 
loves  did  not  gamble  with  love.  They  were  not  butterflies 
by  day  and  moths  by  night.  Human  affections  were  not  things 
to  play  with  in  their  days.  What  a  different  moral  condition 
we  would  have  in  America  today  if  that  still  held.  The 
sacredness  of  love  was  not  a  coat  to  put  on  and  take  off  with 
Abraham  Lincoln.  And  he  loved  her  and  Death  took  her,  and 
his  life  was  never  the  same  after  that. 

There  were  two  things :  Bankruptcy  and  the  death  of  his 
sweetheart.    But  that  was  not  all. 

The  first  time  he  ever  ran  for  the  legislature  of  the  State 
of  Illinois  he  was  hopelessly  defeated  and  they  thought  he 
was  snowed  under  for  life.  That  is  not  all.  He  went  to  that 
legislature  four  times  and  was  defeated  again.  Was  elected 
to  the  Congress  of  the  United  States,  only  served  one  term, 
was  defeated  again;  a  candidate  for  the  United  States  Senate 
and  defeated  again  by  a  young  man  thirty-five  years  old, 
Stephen  A.  Douglas.    Defeated  again.    Married  a  woman  that 


did  not  understand  him;  that  probably  loved  him,  but  who 
was  never  a  part  of  his  life  in  that  sweet  beauty  of  com- 
panionship that  makes  marriage  such  a  happy  and  beautiful 
experience.  Mary  Todd  was  only  the  wife  of  the  President 
Abraham  Lincoln ;  she  was  not  the  sweetheart  of  the  man 
Abraham  Lincoln.  But  that  is  not  all.  After  a  marriage 
that  never  brought  him  what  a  marriage  brings  when  the 
marriage  is  right,  Abraham  Lincoln,  when  the  Whigs  were 
successful  and  he  wanted  a  position  in  the  land  office  and 
was  turned  down,  he  went  to  Philadelphia  in  1856  to  try  an 
important  law  suit  in  which  he  was  associated  with  Edwin 
M.  Stanton  wherein  the  client  was  Mr.  Robert  Emerson.  Mr. 
Stanton  in  1856  refused  to  let  Abraham  Lincoln  make  a  plea 
in  the  courtroom  of  Philadelphia,  because  he  thought  he  would 
reflect  discredit  upon  his  cause  and  upon  his  client  and  told 
him  so,  and  in  1856,  four  years  before  1860 — think  of  that, 
four  years  before  1860,  three  years  before  Lincoln  made  the 
speech  in  Cooper  Union  in  1859  in  New  York.  Think  of  it! 
Lincoln  was  given  a  complimentary  vote  for  Vice-President 
of  the  United  States  in  a  national  convention,  and  the  dele- 
gates, after  the  complimentary  vote  for  Vice-President  had 
been  given  to  Lincoln,  arose  and  asked  who  Lincoln  was! 
In  1856 !  Lincoln  had  been  in  Springfield  as  a  lawyer,  and 
Lincoln  was  well  known  at  the  bar,  but  he  had  not  gone  out 
beyond  the  confines  of  the  State  of  Illinois,  then  it  was  that 
Lincoln  in  1859  made  that  Cooper  Union  speech.  And  for 
the  first  time  Abraham  Lincoln  was  a  national  figure. 

And  I  can  see  him  sitting  there  upon  the  platform  at 
Cooper  Union  with  that  throng  in  front  of  him,  and  I  can 
hear  the  chairman  of  that  meeting  apologize  for  him;  I  can 
hear  the  little  innuendoes  and  reflections.  Then  I  can  see 
him  get  up,  and  I  see  him  unwind  those  long  legs,  six  feet  of 
solid  manhood,  and  walk  out  to  the  edge  of  that  platform,  and 
there — almost  the  use  of  monosyllables,  words  of  one  syllable, 
the  simplicity  of  greatness !  There  stood  Lincoln,  home-spun, 
rough  hewn !  Failed  at  law,  failed  in  business,  failed  in 
office,  failed  in  marriage,  failed  in  scholarship,  failed  in  what 
the  world  called  eloquence.    There  stood  Abraham  Lincoln. 

And  the  world  clung  to  his  words,  and  a  few  months  later 
the  Republican  party  nominated  him  for  the  presidency. 

Explain  it  to  me ! 

Why,  there  is  only  one  explanation,  and  Abraham  Lincoln 
gave  it  himself. 

After  the  Madison  Square  speech,  Abraham  Lincoln  went 
up  into  Vermont,  and  he  met  a  minister,  and  this  minister 


asked  him  to  explain  to  him  why  it  was  that  he  had  such 
power  of  expression  and  could  so  definitely  analyze  his  feelings 
and  had  such  a  happy  way  of  giving  his  ideas,  and  Abraham 
Lincoln  said:  "1  will  tell  you  why.  I  had  a  law  suit  down 
in  Philadelphia  and  they  would  not  let  me  speak.  It  did  not 
make  me  mad;  it  made  me  sad!  And  I  realized  that  these 
Eastern  lawyers  were  college  graduates,  and  I  realized  that 
they  were  coming  further  West  all  the  time,  and  I  realized 
that  if  I  ever  did  what  I  wanted  to  do  in  this  world  I  would 
have  to  be  able  to  cope  with  them  intellectually.  So  at  the 
age  of  forty  I  started  to  study  Euclid  and  at  the  age  of  fifty 
I  really  started  to  study  law. ' ' 

Those  are  the  words  of  Abraham  Lincoln;  at  the  age  of 
forty  he  started  to  study  Euclid.  Now,  you  High  School 
students  know  what  Euclid  is.  It  is  geometry.  Right  away 
I  can  hear  some  of  them  say :  * '  Well,  if  you  have  to  do  that 
to  be  President  of  the  United  States  you  can  count  me  out." 
Because  there  are  not  many  youngsters  that  like  geometry. 

But  Abraham  Lincoln  knew  that  to  think  clearly  and  to 
think  fundamentally  you  must  have  a  trained  mind. 

So  Abraham  Lincoln  mastered  the  first  six  books  of  Euclid, 
which  are  the  first  books  of  Plain  Geometry.  And  there  was 
not  a  single  problem  in  the  first  six  books  of  Euclid  that 
Abraham  Lincoln  could  not  state  and  could  not  solve.  And  he 
himself  said:  "Don't  think  that  I  am  any  different  than 
anybody  else.  The  only  difference  between  me  and  other 
folks  is  that  I  improved  my  opportunities. ' ' 

And  yet  we  seem  to  think  that  all  genius  is  born.  We 
seem  to  feel  that  we  never  do  things  because  we  are  not  an 
Abraham  Lincoln.  Abraham  Lincoln  could  have  died  un- 
honored  and  unsung  if  he  had  permitted  the  experiences  of 
his  life  to  floor  him  at  the  bottom.  Abraham  Lincoln  could 
have  failed,  and  he  had  more  reasons  to  quit  than  most  men, 
but  Abraham  Lincoln  said,  No !  A  trained  mind !  And  he 
mastered  Euclid! 

Is  it  any  wonder  that  he  could  stand  at  Gettysburg  and 
in  two  minutes  and  a  half  make  a  speech  that,  as  we  have 
been  told  by  authorities,  will  live  as  long  as  the  language  of 
Shakespeare  is  spoken? 

WThy,  there  was  not  any  veneer  about  Lincoln.     Lincoln 

so  partook  of  the  out-of-doors — and  there  is  no  veneer  out 

there.     Lincoln  had  the  breeding  of  sincerity,  and  the  first 

mark  of  all  genius  is  sincerity ;  the  first  mark  of  all  greatness 

is  sincerity.     And  Lincoln,  when  he  met  Judge  Douglas  in 

those   debates   throughout   Illinois,   Judge   Douglas  himself 

10 


said  :  "I  have  the  most  formidable  foe  in  debate  that  America 
lias  ever  seen.  He  is  harder  than  Webster ;  he  is  deeper  than 
Calhoun ;  he  is  more  fundamental  than  Clay ;  and  he  is  more 
human  than  Horace  Greeley." 

When  Judge  Douglas  met  him  throughout  the  state  of 
Illinois  in  those  series  of  debates,  what  was  the  Lincoln  that 
won?  It  was  the  Lincoln  of  simplicity.  Lincoln  did  not 
know  much  about  tariff ;  Lincoln  was  not  a  scientific  economist ; 
Lincoln  did  not  know  very  much  about  international 
diplomacy;  he  never  pretended  to.  But  there  was  one  thing; 
that  Lincoln  never  forgot.  He  never  in  all  his  life  forgot 
that  there  was  a  moral  aspect  to  the  problems  of  government, 
and  the  outstanding  contribution  of  Lincoln  to  the  world  is 
there ;  the  moral  rectitude  of  his  mind  and  the  fact  that  there 
was  a  moral  aspect  to  human  government  made  Lincoln  what 
he  was. 

And  in  those  days  when  his  heart  was  bowed  in  grief,  and 
those  years  that  were  dark  and  foreboding  and  nobody  knew 
just  what  would  happen,  and  those  days  when  the  North  was 
not  satisfied  and  the  South  apparently  triumphant;  those 
days  that  some  of  you  can  remember.  I  can't,  of  course,  but 
some  of  you  can.  Those  days  when  the  air  was  vibrant  with 
uncertainty.  This  great  soul,  peaceful  foe,  would  take  little 
Willie  of  the  White  House,  his  only  comfort,  and  stroll  down 
the  banks  of  the  Potomac,  and  when  the  old  moon  was  twink- 
ling its  melody  from  out  its  sky  and  all  the  stars  were  glisten- 
ing with  the  beauty  of  the  night,  and  there  would  be  the 
voices  of  the  open  places.  Abraham  Lincoln's  virgin  soul, 
Abraham  Lincoln's  universal  soul — for  the  last  test  of  all 
genius  is  its  universality.  Originality  is  not  the  test  of 
genius;  universality  is  the  test  of  genius.  Shakespeare  does 
not  belong  to  England;  he  belongs  to  the  world.  Socrates  is 
not  Grecian;  he  is  the  world's.  Homer,  Shakespeare,  and 
Dante,  Milton  and  all  the  rest  are  not  the  properties  of  a 
race  or  creed  or  country;  they  belong  to  humanity.  And 
Abraham  Lincoln  was  humanity's  friend  before  he  was  any- 
thing else,  and  it  was  that  friendship  of  humanity  that  made 
him  loved  like  he  is  today. 

We  envy  the  scholer ;  we  are  interested  in  the  scientist  and 
the  artist,  but  we  all  of  us  love  the  Brother,  and  Abraham 
Lincoln  was  the  Brother. 

And  I  like  to  take  that  gentle  spirit  this  morning  out  of 

its  past,  somewhere ;  I  would  just  like  to  feel  that  if  those 

silent  lips  could  once  more  penetrate  the   quietness  of  the 

tomb,  and  if  that  great  heart  could  beat  just  once  more,  this 

11 





towering  giant  born  and  bred  of  the  open,  whose  brain  was 
always  clear  because  he  had  schooled  himself  to  think  con- 
secutively and  scholarly  and  analytically,  who  always  kept 
a  moral  background,  that  in  spite  of  its  heartaches  and  sad- 
ness and  sorrow,  kept  his  grip ;  who  laughed  sometimes  when 
his  own  heart  was  breaking — and  that  is  the  hardest  laughter 
in  the  world ;  who  told  a  story  sometimes  to  make  folks  laugh 
and  to  establish  a  point,  when  darts  were  pricking  at  the 
sensitive  places  of  his  own  soul. 

Oh,  these  days,  so  much  veneer ;  these  days,  when  men  get 
a  blow  and  don 't  recover ;  in  these  days,  when  so  many  of  our 
American  youth  want  to  take  the  line  of  least  resistance;  in 
these  days  when  there  are  so  many  people  that  think  all  you 
have  to  do  is  to  go  out  and  let  the  world  give  you  a  living 
by  your  wits;  in  these  days  when  we  need  to  emphasize  the 
dignity  of  Labor ;  in  these  days,  if  we  could  just  have  a  little 
more  of  the  sweetness  and  the  fire  of  this  immortal  Lincoln! 

Oh,  great  spirit  of  Lincoln!  There  were  times  when  you 
stood  alone,  and  because  you  stood  alone  you  were  all  the 
stronger  in  the  afterlight. 

They  knocked  you  and  they  fought  you,  and  Horace 
Greeley  and  Thomas  Nash  lied  about  you  and  maligned  you. 
Stanton  said  you  were  wrong,  but  you  said:  "Be  sure  you 
are  right  and  then  go  ahead.' ' 

And  when  you  came  out  of  that  Indiana  home  and  away 
from  Kentucky  and  Indiana  and  from  that  Indiana  home  into 
Illinois  you  blazed  a  trail,  and  so  you  blazed  trails  in  our 
hearts,  and  there  is  a  trail  that  you  blazed  that  no  one  else 
must  follow.  It  is  all  yours.  As  long  as  America  lives,  as 
long  as  the  nation  stands,  men  will  look  to  you,  great  Lincoln, 
with  your  unimpeachable  honesty,  your  finely  developed  in- 
tellectual life  and  your  great  heart. 

Oh,  Lincoln,  may  your  spirit  come  back  to  us. 

"The  coward  never  started.  The  weak  died  on  the  way. 
Only  the  strong  man  arrives/ '  and  that  strength  must  come 
from  mental  and  spiritual  sovereignty. 

The  finest  thing  Abraham  Lincoln  ever  said  was  this : 

"I  want  it  said  of  me  after  I  am  gone,  that  I  always 
plucked  a  thistle  and  planted  a  flower  where  I  thought  a 
flower  would  grow." 


i*<  fowem  mm, 


UNWEBSITr  OF  ItLWOIS 


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